Friday, January 31, 2014

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

"The Eucharist is the sacrament of love: it signifies love, it produces love." - St Thomas Aquinas"The Sacrament of the Body of the Lord puts the demons to flight,
defends us against the incentives to vice and to concupiscence, cleanses
the soul from sin, quiets the anger of God, enlightens the
understanding to know God, inflames the will and the affections with the
love of God, fills the memory with spiritual sweetness, confirms the
entire man in good, frees us from eternal death, multiplies the merits
of a good life, leads us to our everlasting home, and re-animates the
body to eternal life." ~ St. Thomas Aquinas

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Hope For The Broken Hearted Let this truth encourage you today... In Christ we have a love that can never be fathomed, A life that can never die, A peace that can never be understood, A rest that can never be disturbed, A joy that can never be diminished, A hope that can never be disappointed, A glory that can never be clouded, A light that can never be darkened and A spiritual resource that can never be exhausted.Author Unknown

Sunday, January 19, 2014

"America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade
has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted
mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown
violence and discord at the heart of the
most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of
the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has
portrayed the greatest of gifts -- a child -- as a competitor, an
intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers
unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically
dependent sons and daughters" And, in granting this unconscionable
power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from
their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a
privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's
entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not
depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of
anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign."(Mother Theresa --
"Notable and Quotable," Wall Street Journal, 2/25/94, p. A14)

"We
need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God
is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows
in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in
silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls." Mother Teresa

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

“Let us pine for the City where we are citizens… By pining, we are
already there; we have already cast our hope, like an anchor, on that
coast. I sing of somewhere else, not of here; for I sing with my heart,
not my flesh. The citizens of Babylon hear the sound of the flesh, the
Founder of Jerusalem hears the tune of the heart.”- St. Augustine

Sunday, January 12, 2014

"As
was previously announced, on February 22, the Feast of the Chair of
Peter, I will have the joy of holding a Consistory, during which I will
name 16 new Cardinals, who, coming from 12 countries from every part of
the world, represent the deep ecclesial relationship between the Church
of Rome and the other Churches throughout the world. The following day
[February 23] I will preside at a solemn concelebration with the new
Cardinals, while on February 20 and 21 I will hold a Consistory with all
the Cardinals to reflect on the theme of the family."

"Here are the names of the new Cardinals:

1. Pietro Parolin, Titular Archbishop of Acquapendente, Secretary of State

2. Lorenzo Baldisseri, Titular Archbishop of Diocleziana, Secretary General of the Synod of Bishops.

3. Gerhard Ludwig Műller, Archbishop-Bishop emeritus of Regensburg, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

4. Beniamino Stella, Titular Archbishop of Midila, Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

After reading most of Catholic writer Michael D. O'Brien's novels, I've been anxiously waiting for the next one.

His newest novel just came out in December. It's quite a change for O'Brien, as he tells his story through the genre of science fiction.On Amazon, there is a preview of the kindle edition, a generous free preview, about 20 pages or more.Click here to read:Voyage to Alpha Centauri

Michael O'Brien, iconographer, painter, and writer, is the popular author of many best-selling novels including Father Elijah, The Father's Tale, Eclipse of the Sun, Sophia House, .Theophilos, and Island of the World.
His novels have been translated into twelve languages and widely
reviewed in both secular and religious media in North America and
Europe. He lives in Ontario with his wife, Sheila, and family.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Latest article by Father Robert Barron, looks at the relationship between morality and the existence of God."One of the most common observations made by opponents of religion is
that we don't need God in order to have a coherent and integral
morality. Atheists and agnostics are extremely sensitive to the charge
that the rejection of God will conduce automatically to moral chaos.
Consequently, they argue that a robust sense of ethics can be grounded
in the consensus of the human community over time or in the intuitions
and sensibilities of decent people."

"​What I would like to do is lay out, in very brief compass, the
Catholic understanding of the relationship between morality and the
existence of God and to show, thereby, why it is indispensably important
for a society that wishes to maintain its moral integrity to maintain,
at the same time, a vibrant belief in God.".....

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

“From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge—a Church
that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh
more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit
many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her
adherents diminishes, so will she lose many of her social privileges. In
contrast to an earlier age, she will be seen much more as a voluntary
society, entered only by free decision.

As a small society, she
will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual
members. Undoubtedly she will discover new forms of ministry and will
ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession.
In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups,
pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion. Alongside this,
the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as
formerly.

But in all of the changes at which one might guess,
the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that
which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus
Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the
end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize her true
center and experience the sacraments again as the worship of God and
not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.

The Church will be
a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate,
flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard
going for the Church, for the process of crystalization and
clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor
and cause her to become the Church of the meek.

The process
will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as
pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of
this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the
road from the false progressivism of the eve of the French
Revolution—when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas
and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means
certain—to the renewal of the nineteenth century.

But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church.
Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely.
If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole
horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of
believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that
is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching
in secret.

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is
facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have
to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what
will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is
dead already with Gobel, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer
be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently;
but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where
he will find life and hope beyond death.”

Monday, January 6, 2014

"Although in recent years much has been done to spread an accurate
knowledge of the teaching of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, we
are still a long way from Pope Benedict XVI’s desire that the faithful
everywhere, led by their pastors, would rediscover the riches of the
sixteen conciliar documents. The Year of Faith became a year of
disbelief, humanly speaking, as we witnessed the almost unprecedented
abdication of the papal throne and the accession of a new pope whose
words and actions have been interpreted and misinterpreted in a dizzying
whirl of media attention that has certainly not been
characterized by a patient reassessment of the doctrine of the last
ecumenical council—much less the doctrine of the twenty ecumenical
councils and the fullness of Tradition that preceded it.
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the promulgated of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (December
4, 1963). If I may borrow a rhetorical strategy from Fr. Fessio, here
is what your local liturgical scene would look like if we were all
following, to the letter, the teaching of Vatican II:".......

Saturday, January 4, 2014

"This is an excerpt from my book on how I came to become a priest.
St. John of the Cross is a saint who I tell people “saved my life”, not
because I was going to kill myself or anything like that, but because
his teachings helped me move past a very dangerous spiritual mindset
that afflicts most people today – the mindset that if God is working in
my life, I ought to feel it, and it ought to feel good."

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Fr. Richard Heilman's Good Catholic New Year Resolutions1) Put God first in your personal life, your family and your work.
Great people always know how to prioritize. We too need to be reminded
every day to put God first. With God in the first place, the rest seems to fit together naturally.

2) Put prayer as the most important activity in your daily routine.
Living a fast pace life, we try to keep up with everything that needs to
be done. Prayer, then, gets put off because it takes discipline and
does not come naturally. Don’t we know that a day that is not started
with prayer does not go that well? Fight the temptation to put it off
till later. Later usually never comes.

3) Practice humility as
a child of God. Love God so much that you fear offending Him. This is
what “fear of the Lord” really means. And, love what God loves. That
means loving your neighbor. Humbly put your neighbor’s happiness and
needs ahead of your own. That’s what “children of God” do.

4)
Be around holy people who support us, challenge us, and council us on
how to be holy. As we see in the Bible, Jesus gathered the apostles,
disciples and friends around Him. We’re not meant to be lone rangers.
Let’s be humbly open to other’s suggestions and constructive criticism,
especially from holy priests and religious.

5) Read the Bible
and other spiritual classics written by the saints. We have a great
guide to help us on our way to heaven, called the Bible. All we have to
do is sit down and open it and read it. We have thousands of older
brothers and sisters (the saints) who have gone before us and cleared
the path to heaven for us. How do we counter the indoctrination of a
godless society unless we also hear “the other side of the story” – THE
TRUTH – from the greatest book ever written, and from the greatest lives
ever lived?

6) Be consumed by your dire need to “Be in a State
of Grace.” Notice how close you feel to God when you are in a state of
grace. Notice how happy you are when you are in a state of grace. Notice
how open you are to the voice of God when you are in a state of grace.
Notice how easily you love when you are in a state of grace. Notice how
strong you are in facing the trials of life when you are in a state of
grace. And, notice how empty and lost you feel when grace begins to
leave you. Go to Confession at least once a month, and right away if you
fall to serious sin. A “State of Grace is AWESOME!!”

7) Let
Mary Mother You. Begin by praying the rosary everyday as your way of
maintaining that maternal bond with Mary. She is the one who crushes the
head of the serpent – who protects her dear children from harm. She is
the one who dresses up and prepares all of your petitions and presents
them to God on your behalf. Keep your mother close to you.